Modem business organizations are subject to a greater degree of regulatory scrutiny than ever before. Regulatory agencies such as the Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”) impose specific reporting and record keeping requirements on certain classes of businesses. For instance, the record keeping requirements may specify the length of time certain categories of documents must be maintained. Records may be kept longer than the specified time, but cannot be destroyed earlier than the specified time period. As an example, certain types of documents must be retained for a minimum of seven years. These requirements apply to electronic communications, such as electronic documents and electronic mail (“e-mail”) messages, in addition to paper documents.
Despite the regulatory requirements for maintaining documents, business organizations have a strong need to legally destroy documents. This need stems primarily from the extremely large volume of space occupied by both printed and electronic records. In order to balance the burden of maintaining documents in a manner compliant with regulatory requirements and the need to legally destroy documents, companies often define a paperwork retention schedule. A paperwork retention schedule is typically defined by a company's records manager. The paperwork retention schedule defines the period of time that various classes of documents should be retained for. For example, a paperwork retention schedule may indicate that all contracts should be destroyed after seven years. A paperwork retention schedule may be applied to both physical and electronic documents, such as e-mail messages.
In order to apply a paperwork retention schedule to e-mail messages, a policy may be defined by an organization and implemented at an e-mail server computer that specifies how long different categories of e-mail messages should be retained for. Policies may also be specified that define now certain categories of e-mail messages should be preserved and copied to an electronic storage vault. These policies are typically implemented by applying the policies to e-mail messages stored in folders on an e-mail server computer.
Although e-mail policies are helpful in assisting users in filing and maintaining e-mail messages for a specified period of time, one complication in utilizing such policies is that it is often difficult for users to determine the policy that applies to a particular mail folder. Typically, the user finds out that a policy exists only after the policy has been broken and some action is needed by the user to rectify the error. The user cannot preemptively take action with respect to the policy because the user does not know what action is required. This can be particularly frustrating for users of e-mail systems that utilize e-mail related policies.
It is with respect to these considerations and others that the various embodiments of the present invention have been made.